Michael Arrington is one of those internet voices that demands attention, and his TechCrunch blog is must-reading for those truly interested in what’s taking place in the new world. He writes about new companies and new applications, and I’ve found his insight to be prescient and remarkable.
This morning, Michael wrote about another new TV download service that combines BitTorrent, “legitimate” TV downloads and DVD sales. In his summary, he makes an important point for all of us in “the biz” to note, because — like some other applications — this one requires downloading a special player.
It’s clear that this is a product that people will want to use, although more for the Bittorent content than for the for-pay TV shows. A comparison engine for premium TV is nice, but each service has its own viewer and rules (most don’t work with Macs, for example, although iTunes does), and consumers are not going to want to install multiple pieces of software just to view different TV shows.
He’s right about what consumers will tolerate, which is why we need to be very careful in building our futures around proprietary players. Granted, you can do some amazing things with such, but consider a real world comparison. What if you needed a separate television set in your den for each of the different movie channels available? Or an ABC set, an NBC set and a CBS set? This is what we’re asking of our viewers when we attempt to put our live stream (or any content) into a proprietary player.
So in terms of video we have various file formats and codecs. What do you recommend we use?
Flash.